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This is an excellent article for raising awareness of AI. However, I disagree with its conclusion that we will always relate to AI as tools, pets, advisers, etc

by bmh100 16y ago

This is an excellent article for raising awareness of AI. However, I disagree with its conclusion that we will always relate to AI as tools, pets, advisers, etc. When we ask whether machines can think, I believe it is a question of volition and self-direction. Does the machine have an open-ended goal and is self aware? Can it alter its own programming to change its own methods, its own knowledge, and its own goals? If the answer to these two is "yes," then I believe we will consider the machine to be thinking. What are the implications? If machines gain those capacities, as well as the ability to compute emotions, then what separates them from us? If you agree that humanity is fundamentally a function of our minds, then, if machines can compute in fundamentally equivalent ways, they become "human." What evidence is there that this is forever impossible?

tgflynn 16y ago
If you agree that humanity is fundamentally a function of our minds What about the ability to feel pleasure and pain ? I don't believe a deterministic machine will ever experience such subjective feelings (though it may behave as if it does). Computers may well become sapient but they (at least with current technology) will never be sentient.
- jbri 16y ago
  What is "pleasure" and "pain"? Ultimately, they're just electrical signals triggering the release of certain chemicals in the brain, with subsequent alterations to how the brain processes other stimuli. "It doesn't really feel pain, it just looks like it does" is probably how many people justified atrocities against other humans they viewed as somehow "lesser".
  - tgflynn 16y ago
    Maybe they're just electrical signals in the brain but that's not how we experience them. A CPU cannot experience the electrical signals that flow through it. Unless you believe rocks are sentient. I could just as easily turn your argument around and argue that torturing you is perfectly OK because all I'd be doing is creating electrical signals in your brain.
    - memetichazard 16y ago
      But that is how we experience them - though perhaps not with electrical signals, but chemical ones instead. e.g. dopamine. We're programmed to enjoy dopamine.
      - tgflynn 16y ago
        Humans experienced pleasure long before they knew anything about dopamine. You seem to be rejecting the reality of subjective experience by equating it to its objectively observable physical correlates. Moral judgements are not (at least historically have not been) based on such observables but rather on the assumption that that which causes oneself pleasure or pain typically does so for others as well. You can put someone in an FMRI and find that certain brain signals correlate with that person claiming to feel pain (ie. correlate brain state with behavior) but you can never establish a causal relationship between those signals and the subjective experience of pain because subjective experience is by definition not objectively observable. These sorts of philosophical arguments have been going on for a long time with little practical effect. However there is a danger that if machines do become sapient and surpass us in intelligence that based on such arguments they will conclude that human beings are merely an inferior form of intelligence which is not worth preserving. If humans themselves deny the existence of subjective experience then why should machines believe in such a thing.
        adrianN 16y ago
        Computers also calculated pi long before we used them to design circuits. "However there is a danger that if machines do become sapient and surpass us in intelligence that based on such arguments they will conclude that human beings are merely an inferior form of intelligence which is not worth preserving" You mean like we act towards animals today?
    - jbri 16y ago
      I could just as easily turn your argument around and argue that torturing you is perfectly OK because all I'd be doing is creating electrical signals in your brain. That's actually (almost) the point of my comment - if, in two logical steps you can get from your argument to "torture is alright", perhaps you should reconsider your argument. Perhaps you should also consider why (a large part of) humanity considers torture to be a Bad Thing?
- feral 16y ago
  Thought experiment: If there was a human that suffered an injury that left them unable to feel pleasure, or pain - some form of nerve damage, perhaps - I wouldn't think any less of that human's mental function. I wouldn't think they had lost any humanity, or argue they should be accorded any less human rights. I think that they'd still have hopes, and fears, would be much more important than their ability to feel pain or pleasure. Given this, how important is the ability to feel pleasure, or pain, really? I think you are focusing on the wrong thing, and disagree with this way of assessing humanity.
  - tgflynn 16y ago
    I used pleasure and pain as examples of subjective experiences. Hopes and fears are other examples. If you believe that humanity amounts to more than merely electrical signals and other physical phenomena (ie you're not a reductionist) then I'm surprised it's my side of the argument you're disagreeing with.
    - sgrove 16y ago
      I disagree, but I do find it a very fascinating subject area. I would highly recommend reading through Valentino's "Vehicles"(http://www.amazon.com/Vehicles-Experiments-Psychology-Valentino-Braitenberg/dp/0262521121 http://www.amazon.com/Vehicles-Experiments-Psychology-Valent...). It's incredibly short, thought provoking, and somewhat humorous to boot. He goes over building very simple machines that appear to have emotions, hopes, plans, etc., and goes over they exact topic you're talking about.
    - feral 16y ago
      It is hard to have this conversation on hacker news. The format works well for general discussion, but this is a particularly subtle topic - its hard to make conversational progress before several essays back and forth to pin down a set of agreed terminology. This is something I'm struggling with here. I don't want to get bogged down in a debate on good semantics, but without clarification its hard to have any meaningful discussion. Sometimes you need to spend some time discussing semantics, in order to move past them. I need a word to describe the sort of higher level awareness that we humans have in and of ourselves, that makes it not ok to 'switch off' another human. Normally, I'd say sapience, after 'wisdom' - but you are clearly using that in a different meaning, so I'll go with 'personhood', without limiting that necessarily to homo sapiens. While we still know relatively little about personhood, I would be happier to use hopes and fears as a defining criteria, over pleasure and pain. Pleasure and pain are very low-level sensory phenomena. Very simple life can feel pleasure and pain - pain particularly; to my mind, they are neither necessary, nor sufficient, criteria for personhood. Hopes are fears are, I think, the product of a much higher level reasoning process. For a start, they are not merely short term and reactive; they pre-suppose some model of the future. Further, I think they generally necessitate a model of self, and an awareness of self in that future. That makes them very different criteria, in general. If you were arguing that 'subjective experiences' were necessary for personhood, it'd have been better to state that explicitly. The post you were responding, when you mentioned pleasure and pain, said that 'humanity was fundamentally a function of our minds'. I agree with that post. If you require pleasure and pain - which clearly require some level of situatedness in a sensory apparatus which can communicate these sensations - for your definition of personhood, then I can see how you would argue against a machine 'simulating' personhood. However, with hopes and fears, no such situatedness is required. I see no reason why a machine couldn't potentially simulate/execute a program/consciousness that had hopes and fears, even without a body, or conventional sensory input. I see no reason why a simulated/executed (it is very important to realise that these two verbs have the same effective result in this context) program couldn't have subjective experience. >If you believe that humanity amounts to more than merely electrical signals and other physical phenomena (ie you're not a reductionist) then I'm surprised it's my side of the argument you're disagreeing with. So many difficult (loaded?) words there: 'amounts', 'merely', 'reductionist', 'side'. I believe humanity amounts to more than merely electrical signals, in the same way I believe the mona lisa 'amounts' to more than 'merely' a collection of oils on a poplar. Join the technological revolution: its not the atoms that are important - its the bits. The pattern things are in is much more important than the things themselves. A quicksort algorithm running on vaccum tubes, or transistors, or water pipes, or CPU simulated in minecraft, or rocks in an XKCD desert, is still a quicksort algorithm. Its not 'merely' a collection of electrical signals. Its become more than that, because the electrical signals are arranged in a certain pattern. But its still fully explainable in terms of electrical signals. >(ie you're not a reductionist) I do believe our minds are defined and explained (in theory) by physical phenomena, like everything else in the universe. I'm not a supernaturalist. How about you?
- adrianN 16y ago
  You are basically arguing about P-Zombies[1]. I think that line of argument is fallacious. What if the computer were powerful enough to perfectly simulate the workings of a human brain? Does that brain not have a consciousness? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-Zombie http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-Zombie
  - tgflynn 16y ago
    Well first I don't think a computer (at least a deterministic one) will ever be powerful enough to "perfectly simulate the workings of the human brain". That would be a quantum N-body simulation with N > 10^23. There probably isn't enough matter/energy in the universe to do that. When people talk of simulating the human brain they mean something along the lines of : if we assume that the function of the human brain is entirely determined by the transmission of electrophysiological signals between neurons then we will be able to simulate that behavior in the not too distant future. Personally I think we'll have general AI's, machines which can pass the Turing test, well before such simulations have been developed. In either case I can't see how a CPU could become sentient just because of the software it's running. Think about it. Do you worry that you're CPU might be suffering when you drive it hard ? If the simple fact of running the right software can allow a piece of silicon to feel pain then that's something that my model of physical reality can't account for.
    - khafra 16y ago
      Do you worry that you've died and a new, unrelated consciousness born every time a cosmic ray pops a single electron in your brain up to a higher orbit? It seems obvious from the amount of mechanical or chemical intervention that's required to create a detectable change in consciousness that the human substrate for consciousness only matters at a far more macroscopic level than the quantum. Also, I think that the amount of worry you experience over whether a computational substrate running software designed without consciousness in mind can suffer is a very, very, very poor proxy for the question of whether machine sentience is possible. Think about it. If you did have a magical hypercomputer, and a program running on it which ran a perfect quantum simulation of a human baby in unbearable pain, would you remain completely blasé?

by bmh100 16y ago

tgflynn 16y ago

If you agree that humanity is fundamentally a function of our minds What about the ability to feel pleasure and pain ? I don't believe a deterministic machine will ever experience such subjective feelings (though it may behave as if it does). Computers may well become sapient but they (at least with current technology) will never be sentient.

jbri 16y ago
What is "pleasure" and "pain"? Ultimately, they're just electrical signals triggering the release of certain chemicals in the brain, with subsequent alterations to how the brain processes other stimuli. "It doesn't really feel pain, it just looks like it does" is probably how many people justified atrocities against other humans they viewed as somehow "lesser".
- tgflynn 16y ago
  Maybe they're just electrical signals in the brain but that's not how we experience them. A CPU cannot experience the electrical signals that flow through it. Unless you believe rocks are sentient. I could just as easily turn your argument around and argue that torturing you is perfectly OK because all I'd be doing is creating electrical signals in your brain.
  - memetichazard 16y ago
    But that is how we experience them - though perhaps not with electrical signals, but chemical ones instead. e.g. dopamine. We're programmed to enjoy dopamine.
    - tgflynn 16y ago
      Humans experienced pleasure long before they knew anything about dopamine. You seem to be rejecting the reality of subjective experience by equating it to its objectively observable physical correlates. Moral judgements are not (at least historically have not been) based on such observables but rather on the assumption that that which causes oneself pleasure or pain typically does so for others as well. You can put someone in an FMRI and find that certain brain signals correlate with that person claiming to feel pain (ie. correlate brain state with behavior) but you can never establish a causal relationship between those signals and the subjective experience of pain because subjective experience is by definition not objectively observable. These sorts of philosophical arguments have been going on for a long time with little practical effect. However there is a danger that if machines do become sapient and surpass us in intelligence that based on such arguments they will conclude that human beings are merely an inferior form of intelligence which is not worth preserving. If humans themselves deny the existence of subjective experience then why should machines believe in such a thing.
      - adrianN 16y ago
        Computers also calculated pi long before we used them to design circuits. "However there is a danger that if machines do become sapient and surpass us in intelligence that based on such arguments they will conclude that human beings are merely an inferior form of intelligence which is not worth preserving" You mean like we act towards animals today?
  - jbri 16y ago
    I could just as easily turn your argument around and argue that torturing you is perfectly OK because all I'd be doing is creating electrical signals in your brain. That's actually (almost) the point of my comment - if, in two logical steps you can get from your argument to "torture is alright", perhaps you should reconsider your argument. Perhaps you should also consider why (a large part of) humanity considers torture to be a Bad Thing?
feral 16y ago
Thought experiment: If there was a human that suffered an injury that left them unable to feel pleasure, or pain - some form of nerve damage, perhaps - I wouldn't think any less of that human's mental function. I wouldn't think they had lost any humanity, or argue they should be accorded any less human rights. I think that they'd still have hopes, and fears, would be much more important than their ability to feel pain or pleasure. Given this, how important is the ability to feel pleasure, or pain, really? I think you are focusing on the wrong thing, and disagree with this way of assessing humanity.
- tgflynn 16y ago
  I used pleasure and pain as examples of subjective experiences. Hopes and fears are other examples. If you believe that humanity amounts to more than merely electrical signals and other physical phenomena (ie you're not a reductionist) then I'm surprised it's my side of the argument you're disagreeing with.
  - sgrove 16y ago
    I disagree, but I do find it a very fascinating subject area. I would highly recommend reading through Valentino's "Vehicles"(http://www.amazon.com/Vehicles-Experiments-Psychology-Valentino-Braitenberg/dp/0262521121 http://www.amazon.com/Vehicles-Experiments-Psychology-Valent...). It's incredibly short, thought provoking, and somewhat humorous to boot. He goes over building very simple machines that appear to have emotions, hopes, plans, etc., and goes over they exact topic you're talking about.
  - feral 16y ago
    It is hard to have this conversation on hacker news. The format works well for general discussion, but this is a particularly subtle topic - its hard to make conversational progress before several essays back and forth to pin down a set of agreed terminology. This is something I'm struggling with here. I don't want to get bogged down in a debate on good semantics, but without clarification its hard to have any meaningful discussion. Sometimes you need to spend some time discussing semantics, in order to move past them. I need a word to describe the sort of higher level awareness that we humans have in and of ourselves, that makes it not ok to 'switch off' another human. Normally, I'd say sapience, after 'wisdom' - but you are clearly using that in a different meaning, so I'll go with 'personhood', without limiting that necessarily to homo sapiens. While we still know relatively little about personhood, I would be happier to use hopes and fears as a defining criteria, over pleasure and pain. Pleasure and pain are very low-level sensory phenomena. Very simple life can feel pleasure and pain - pain particularly; to my mind, they are neither necessary, nor sufficient, criteria for personhood. Hopes are fears are, I think, the product of a much higher level reasoning process. For a start, they are not merely short term and reactive; they pre-suppose some model of the future. Further, I think they generally necessitate a model of self, and an awareness of self in that future. That makes them very different criteria, in general. If you were arguing that 'subjective experiences' were necessary for personhood, it'd have been better to state that explicitly. The post you were responding, when you mentioned pleasure and pain, said that 'humanity was fundamentally a function of our minds'. I agree with that post. If you require pleasure and pain - which clearly require some level of situatedness in a sensory apparatus which can communicate these sensations - for your definition of personhood, then I can see how you would argue against a machine 'simulating' personhood. However, with hopes and fears, no such situatedness is required. I see no reason why a machine couldn't potentially simulate/execute a program/consciousness that had hopes and fears, even without a body, or conventional sensory input. I see no reason why a simulated/executed (it is very important to realise that these two verbs have the same effective result in this context) program couldn't have subjective experience. >If you believe that humanity amounts to more than merely electrical signals and other physical phenomena (ie you're not a reductionist) then I'm surprised it's my side of the argument you're disagreeing with. So many difficult (loaded?) words there: 'amounts', 'merely', 'reductionist', 'side'. I believe humanity amounts to more than merely electrical signals, in the same way I believe the mona lisa 'amounts' to more than 'merely' a collection of oils on a poplar. Join the technological revolution: its not the atoms that are important - its the bits. The pattern things are in is much more important than the things themselves. A quicksort algorithm running on vaccum tubes, or transistors, or water pipes, or CPU simulated in minecraft, or rocks in an XKCD desert, is still a quicksort algorithm. Its not 'merely' a collection of electrical signals. Its become more than that, because the electrical signals are arranged in a certain pattern. But its still fully explainable in terms of electrical signals. >(ie you're not a reductionist) I do believe our minds are defined and explained (in theory) by physical phenomena, like everything else in the universe. I'm not a supernaturalist. How about you?
adrianN 16y ago
You are basically arguing about P-Zombies[1]. I think that line of argument is fallacious. What if the computer were powerful enough to perfectly simulate the workings of a human brain? Does that brain not have a consciousness? [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-Zombie http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P-Zombie
- tgflynn 16y ago
  Well first I don't think a computer (at least a deterministic one) will ever be powerful enough to "perfectly simulate the workings of the human brain". That would be a quantum N-body simulation with N > 10^23. There probably isn't enough matter/energy in the universe to do that. When people talk of simulating the human brain they mean something along the lines of : if we assume that the function of the human brain is entirely determined by the transmission of electrophysiological signals between neurons then we will be able to simulate that behavior in the not too distant future. Personally I think we'll have general AI's, machines which can pass the Turing test, well before such simulations have been developed. In either case I can't see how a CPU could become sentient just because of the software it's running. Think about it. Do you worry that you're CPU might be suffering when you drive it hard ? If the simple fact of running the right software can allow a piece of silicon to feel pain then that's something that my model of physical reality can't account for.
  - khafra 16y ago
    Do you worry that you've died and a new, unrelated consciousness born every time a cosmic ray pops a single electron in your brain up to a higher orbit? It seems obvious from the amount of mechanical or chemical intervention that's required to create a detectable change in consciousness that the human substrate for consciousness only matters at a far more macroscopic level than the quantum. Also, I think that the amount of worry you experience over whether a computational substrate running software designed without consciousness in mind can suffer is a very, very, very poor proxy for the question of whether machine sentience is possible. Think about it. If you did have a magical hypercomputer, and a program running on it which ran a perfect quantum simulation of a human baby in unbearable pain, would you remain completely blasé?